Ever play Avalon Hill's solitaire game, B-17: Queen of the Skies (1981)? An interesting game where you fly your fortress to a target and back. Drive off enemy fighters and withstand flak over the target. Mechanical systems get damaged, crew get incapacitated, ammo runs low, oil leaks, engine fires, and all manner of unfortunate things can occur (such as dropping out of formation) as your mission drags on. Get back safely and continue to hopefully complete 25 missions to get you that ticket home.

B-17: Queen of the Skies is a strategy game which re-creates the early bombing missions and aerial combat of the B-17 (F Model) bombers of the US Eighth Air Force over Europe between October 1942 and May 1943. Movement to targets is through zones. Die rolls and game tables determine appearance, type, and position of enemy fighters. Charts are used to determine if hits are made, where the damage is located, and how serious the damage is. Game tables and die rolls also determine everything from the bomber's target and formation position to weather, flak, and German fighter opposition as the B-17 makes its way over land and sea to its target.

The game has a low complexity and typically, the playing time is generally less than one hour after your first few games.

B-17 is designed to be primarily a solitaire game. The player controls a B-17F Flying Fortress bomber, trying to survive German fighter attacks and drop its load of bombs on the selected target, then return home safely. Optionally, a second player can control the German fighters (to some degree; their appearance is determined randomly, but successive attacks are under the control of the German player). If each player has their own copy of B-17, then they can fly their bomber while playing the German fighters in their partner's game.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1032/b-17-queen-skies

Hands-On: B-17 Queen of the Skies https://youtu.be/wzfACdk2BJkIn this episode of Hands-On Games I take a look an oldie but a goodie, and a game considered by many to be a solitaire "classic" - B-17 Queen of the Skies by Avalon Hill.

I picked up a bunch of wargame magazines that were thrown out at a Marine Corps base (along with a lot of Proceedings and Leatherneck magazines) and reading these magazines (The General, Strategy & Tactics, Wargamer, etc.), it was interesting to see how video games began seriously competing with board wargaming. From scant mention in the 1970s and '80s to pressing concern in the '90s Where Nintendo and Sega began getting popular up to the late '90s where home video games really got popular with the Sony Playstation and the board wargame industry died an agonizing death with only a few popular titles still taking up room in game store shelves.

Historical board wargames took too much time to read the rules and too much time to set up and play.

- Avalon Hill's The General Magazine vol 10 issue 02 Luftwaffe issue, 1973. 1964 was the date of their first publication. Their articles of the Vietnam War were interesting to read.

>>58428Interesting instructional training video on bomber crew flying evasive maneuvers in order to avoid anti-aircraft artillery fire. I remember reading interviews with older pilots who were flying bombing missions during the '91 Gulf War who also flew 20+ years previously in the Vietnam War. They could actually maneuver their nimble F-16 Falcons away from flak artillery shells that they saw. And when other attack aircraft flew effective flak and SAM suppression ahead of the bombers, the anti-aircraft problems quickly dwindled away.